ARE YOU A TRUDEAU OR A TRUDON'T

Canada's Ethics Commissioner released its report on the SNC-Lavalin scandal and it is - as I am sure has at least partially filtered its way to you even if you don't especially pay attention to the news - harsh. Specifically, it finds that Justin Trudeau broke conflict-of-interest rules by lobbying (harassing? repeatedly saying a thingy) Jodi Wilson-Raybould to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the SNC-Lavalin matter, which makes Trudeau guilty and means that he will have to pay a fine that will be paid in actual dollars so you know it's serious.

David Hamer (a retired and well-esteemed Toronto lawyer with a ton of experience in constitutional law - and, in fairness, a longtime Liberal party member) wrote an excellent thread on Twitter about how he believes the Commissioner's report is legally wrong on a number of levels. I agree with much of it - I think Hamer's reasoning about the report's misapplication of "improper" with respect to statutory law (suggesting that the Commissioner incorrectly sought to modify the clause "seek to influence a decision" with "improper" when in fact the statute actually places "improper" before ""further another person's private interests" - which are two different things!) is at best a supporting argument and a bit of a hairsplit, but Hamer's argument that the report ignores the Shawcross doctrine (which is a common-law decision which explains how the PM is allowed to discuss matters with the AG) and his argument that the ethics commissioner stretches the definition of "political direction" to a fairly unreasonable extent are very solid.

All of that said, though, is this going to Change The Landscape Of The Election? Ultimately, I think the answer is "probably not." I don't think SNC-Lavalin fallout is going to change anybody's mind at this point, and Trudeau wisely chose the politically reasonable tactic of "I don't agree that what I did was wrong because I was going to save jobs but I'm going to pay that fine in actual dollars because I respect the law" so I don't expect the scandal to have serious legs, mostly because at this point everybody knows that the more Trudeau gets to say "I was trying to save jobs" the better it is for the Liberals' numbers in Quebec. My guess is this ends up being a one-off attack line for other party leaders at the debates and the election goes back to being about all the other stuff.

CANADA DOESN'T HAVE A LIBERAL MEDIA, PART THE NTH

Canadaland leaked an internal memo from Postmedia which demonstrated that the newspaper chain (which owns the National Post, all of the Sun papers, eighteen other dailies - many of which are the only major daily in their cities - and a couple dozen community papers) has centrally directed all of its papers to become more "reliably conservative." This is sort of funny if you've ever read the Post, which is a retirement home for every nigh-talentless conservative hack in the country who can still wheeze out a column once a week about how millennials aren't showing them enough respect, or for that matter any of the Sun papers, which in between the sports section and the titties routinely spend column inches screaming about the pinkos ruining everything or occasionally letting Tarek Fatah indulge himself in an anti-Muslim eliminationist fantasy.

News items like this are a regular reminder that Canada's news coverage is not "liberal" or left-wing in any meaningful sense. Most Canadian papers are conservative, because Postmedia owns almost all of them. (You may not remember that in the 2015 election Postmedia's central board ordered all of their papers to endorse the Conservatives, despite most of those papers wanting not to.) The Globe and Mail is center-right and always has been. Most news TV generally leans centre-right because it's all owned by Bell or Rogers, who as giant telecom companies are not actually ever going to be left-wing, go figure. The CBC, for all that conservatives complain, is terrified of appearing biased and since it's always the right that complains about liberal media, the Ceeb always tries to split it right down the middle, sometimes with amusing results. Talk radio is, of course, staunchly conservative and always has been. All that's left is the Toronto Star and its satellite papers, the French-language press in Quebec and the Winnipeg Free Press, and most of those are, at best, centre-left.

SPEAKING OF NOT LIBERAL MEDIA, HOW ABOUT YOUTUBE

The New York Times reported comprehensively this past week on Youtube's algorithm creating a far-right radicalization paradigm shift (in particular, crediting Youtube with contributing to the rise in popularity of Jair Bolsonaro and helping him to win the Presidency of Brazil) and it's... definitely troubling, to say the least.

The problem with the algorithm, essentially - according to the researchers - is not that it is inherently right-wing. It's not designed to be right-wing. It's designed to entice people to watch more videos, because that iswhat makes Youtube money, and in a vacuum that sounds perfectly reasonable. But the problem is that the algorithm - which, like most algorithms of this sort, is basically a self-teaching guided artificial intelligence at this point - has recognized what makes people keep watching videos, and the answer is mostly not baby shark doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo (well, except for toddlers), because once you're in your teens or older the little hits of endorphin you get from really enjoying a pleasant video don't keep you watching Youtube all day. It turns out what keeps you (or, at least, the average person) watching Youtube for a longer than average time are videos that trigger fear and anger. This is right down to neurobiology: anger and fear originate in your limbic system, the oldest part of your lizard brain, and will give you a dopamine rush (because originally, way back in the day, when we felt anger or fear it was usually because we were about to get eaten by something large with teeth, and the dopamine rush gave us better odds of not being eaten). But if you are watching a video that triggers that reaction, and then get the chance to watch another video that you instinctively recognize might give you the same reaction... well.

Like I said: the algorithm isn't political. But the problem is that the best tools for maximizing anger and fear tend to be conspiracy theories, because there's no logical endpoint for that anger and fear to be utilized (like, climate change, you can at least go plant a tree or walk more). In practice, this tends to end up being a sort of weird filter effect, where if you are watching, say, home repair tutorial videos, eventually you'll watch a perfectly otherwise normal home repair tutorial video from a guy who also occasionally posts videos ranting about Obama stealing his guns, or how vaccines are causing autism, or how the earth is really flat. (No, seriously, flat-earth Youtube is a thing. They have invented all sorts of truly amazing theories, all of which are blissfully stupid, and the fascinating thing is that flat-earthism only really exploded in popularity with Youtube - and to a lesser extent Facebook - using these sorts of algorithms to drive engagement.) Then, Youtube recommends another video on the same topic. And then maybe you start falling down a rabbit hole.

Obviously, none of this is guaranteed to radicalize everybody. But the point isn't to radicalize everybody: the point is that the algorithm has recognized (entirely correctly) that this content will radicalize enough people that they will watch many many more videos about the conspiracy hole they've dug down into, and that then they'll probably watch videos about other crazy conspiracy theories (cross-pollination is a big deal here), and then they'll hit "like" and subscribe and do all the other things every Youtuber asks you to do, which raises the prominence of those videos and increases the possibility that Youtube just suggests these videos to me and you, which is why Jordan fucking Peterson videos keep showing up in my Recommendations list when literally all I want to do with Youtube is listen to music, watch videos about film theory and occasionally watch a baby elephant play with an inflatable pool or something else cute like that.

The end result is increased radicalization and conspiracy-brained behaviour, which has real-world effects - like in Brazil, where antivaxx and conspiracy videos led many to people refuse to cooperate with anti-Zika efforts following a 2018 outbreak. This is a major problem and nobody seems to be doing shit about it. Youtube, for their part, claims that their own internal data says that the researchers are wrong, but also no you can't see that internal data, why would they let you see their internal data?

Remember when we all thought "Gangnam Style" was the end of the internet as we knew it? Good times.

A BIT OF GOOD NEWS AFTER ALL THAT BAD NEWS

Researchers in Nigeria have, with the latest round of vaccine development, lowered mortality rates for Ebola from 75% (untreated) to six percent with the right combination of drugs. That is ridiculously fast for any vaccination development and, with mass production of these vaccines forthcoming, effectively ends Ebola as a major disease threat for the forseeable future. (I mean, sure, it could mutate into something else, these are always things that can happen, but it's not likely.)

Humans - we can, in fact, fix quite a lot of things when we put our minds to it! Isn't that encouraging?

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Rocketman (2019, Dexter Fletcher, Google Play) - 4/5

Have been enjoying Bad North, a fun little game on Steam where you control bands of little Vikings and send them out to violently murder other little Vikings. Seriously, you just slaughter the little bastards. Good fun all around. Oh, and if you haven't read the New York Times' "1619 Project" essays, you're missing out; there's some truly excellent writing there about race and slavery in America.

See you in seven.